Probably because it’s historically generated a ton of traffic and they’re trying to fluff up their numbers to hide the aftermath of their mistakes.

Shit like this is why I switched to a third party app a while ago. I used to have the official app on my phone because iOS and everything I remembered seeing as far as 3PAs went was all for Android before I heard of Apollo. But the fact that I was seeing “posts” like this every three-or-so posts, and the fact that they were all over the comments as well was just way too much.

It’s exactly why I will not go back. I have like three niche subreddits saved that have no real equivalent in the Fediverse and I’ll only check in on occasion. Through Old.Reddit. With a browser that has an ad blocker built in.

@Oshka
Ah, fantastic. Thank you very much! :)

They’re from exploding-heads. Best to just ignore them, and don’t feed the trolls.

Hopefully we can get defederated from them eventually.

I feel like I should feel bad that I was able to figure out which copy-pasta this was after the first sentence.

I imagine it does. You’re still signing in and interacting with the platform, so it still likely counts.

I feel like “traffic” is also easy to fake. People can drum up an army of new bots and suddenly the “traffic” is back, even if actual people aren’t.

From what I had read, it seems like it’s done by letting people command AutoMod (or a different bot account that has Mod access to the sub) in the comments, similar to how people would use the RepostSleuth or RemindMe bots. So unfortunately, this probably dies when the API gets murdered at the end of the month.

Kinda like how Apple often makes terrible decisions that everyone hates, and then every other company follows suit because it actually worked and it’s been normalized now. Musk made all sorts of garbage decisions and didn’t lose critical mass of users, so now every other social media company is gonna follow suit now that the terrible ideas have been “normalized” by one of them.

Same here. Ran a script to edit and delete all my comments yesterday. At least cleared out the 1,000 that Reddit saves in your comment history. I’m not deleting my account yet in case they decide to mysteriously restore my comments.

Conspiracy theory: what if Reddit is using it’s not army to make a bunch of dead/spam accounts to try to make Lemmy instances more expensive solely to try to price them out of their space so they can then turn and point to how “Reddit alternatives aren’t viable/stable.”

On one hand, that’s obviously stupid and not true. On the other hand, I can see Huffman being petty and malicious enough to do something like that.

I’ve only gotten through three episodes so far, but it’s doing pretty well so far.

Honestly, I think my favorite so far is Joan is Awful. Just the right level of sci-fi, and it’s the only one that I didn’t see the big twist coming way beforehand.

Loch Henry is good, but I always feel like the non-futuristic-technology episodes have their own club in the corner of my mind that just… feel almost out of place. Not saying they’re bad, but I definitely feel like they’re at a disadvantage for me.

Except that it wouldn’t fix the fact that a lot of 3rd party developers are done. Even if Reddit sacked Huffman and rolled back the API changes, the odds of Apollo, RiF, Sync, etc. developers coming back is basically zero after all of this.

And now that they’ve shown their hand with the mods, the odds of getting their good mods back are slim-to-none as well.

They’ll just restore it if you nuke it. Better to make the sub NSFW so they can’t make ad revenue off of it and set it so that all posts must be mod-approved, then only approve like one post every month so you can show as still being active.

This feels so weird to me. Pikmin 4 has been my silly “haha what if they finally announced/released it” game for a while now, and the fact that it’s almost actually out makes me wonder what game I should joke about existing next.

Agree with the general consensus saying no to default communities. Maybe a “recommended” list that it displays for you while you’re still new (like… maybe until you have 5-8 communities subscribed to) but I don’t think you should be forced into certain ones at the start.

I feel like /r/videos only being cat videos would still make it a worthwhile sub. Make it so that any videos shared that are above 240p are against the rules and subject to be automatically deleted.

Because capitalism. Everything is set up on the literally-impossible goal of continuous, unending growth. Lots of shitty decisions get made on the assumption that you can always be continuing upward, even when you literally can’t anymore. Have one quarter where things dip a bit and it could be the end of you as the investors jump ship over it.

I mean… technically people did come and ask it anything. It just decided not to actually answer any of the questions that were asked.

Even the fourteen comments that were made didn’t actually answer any of the questions that were asked. And that’s if you consider copy/pasting pre-approved responses as actual answers in the first place.